thirteen ways

I heart my iPod.

Got it last year – first generation Nano, black, 4 GB. Filled with pop songs from John Legend, Cake, Imogen Heap, Alien Ant Farm, and Panic! At the Disco, it serves as my personal DJ of my favorite songs, whether I’m at the gym, cooking in my kitchen, or driving from gig to gig.

I rarely download more than one track from an album. I like my shuffle of favorite songs (collected in a playlist regrettably titled “Now: Top 100”) to be eclectic, surprising in its juxtapositions, and tailored to my every whim—I picked the songs, after all. The only albums that exist in their entirety on my iPod are a collection of Paganini Caprices played by Michael Rabin (uploaded so I can choose the most reasonable ones for an upcoming recital), the soundtrack to Brokeback Mountain (a gift from the composer), and the Charlie Brown Christmas Album (cause, well, I like it all).

So when we release a disc like strange imaginary animals on Cedille, I have to ask myself – would you yourself listen to this disc as an album? From start to finish? If you weren’t playing on it?

I don’t know. That’s the honest answer. But I’ve got to say we sure put a lot of thought into making it an album that works. We recorded for four long days with album producer Judy Sherman, Cedille engineer Bill Maylone, and Ball State engineer Jeff Seitz in Muncie, Indiana. We traded edits (making sure we played the right notes at the right time) back and forth for six months, and then re-assembled in Muncie to mix the disc (making sure you could hear all the right notes at the right time). Lisa Kaplan and I went to New York in October to master it with Paul Zinman (comparing one piece to another and tweaking levels so that the whole disc sounds cohesive), all the while discussing possible designs for the disc art and packaging. Every detail, from the order of the tracks to the spaces between them, was decided upon, as a group and with Cedille, to make the best possible listening experience from start to finish.

How did we do it? Why did we care? What’s the point of making an album in an iPod world?

The funny thing is that the album is actually kind of like an iPod playlist, at least the kind that I like. The repertoire all fits within our strange imaginary concept, in that each piece asks us to play our instruments in an atypical fashion, even for new music. There’s lots of percussive writing for all the instruments, and then there are beautiful sustains in the percussion. A lot of us play with quarter-tones (imagine a piano with a key in between each pair of keys on the keyboard – those in-between notes are quarter-tones), and there are two electro-acoustic tracks at the end that mess with all the sounds that came before.

But each piece kind of bounces off the previous one – you hear Zaka and get into an energetic groove, then violence begins and you’re swimming through a soft, lush wave of sustained chords and twittering solos. Indigenous Instruments interrupts the peacefulness with a jauntiness that never quite seems to line up (but it does – trust me), and then Friction Systems takes those quirky rhythmic juxtapositions and throws them back in your face, ten times louder. Ears still ringing from the assault, you’re taken back to the peacefulness of violence, reinterpreted electronically as evanescence, before you’re brought back down to earth with another groove, this one slower and more ambient, in the strange imaginary remix.

When I really like a shuffle that my iPod creates, I date it and create another playlist to record the moment. I love it when hearing two songs back to back makes you hear each one differently. And that’s what this disc does: it takes six pieces from five different composers and mashes them up against one another – there aren’t even pauses between the last few tracks. It’s like we DJ’ed it already for you. (You’re welcome.)

I’m sure somebody’s going to put this album on her own iPod and shuffle it, completely disregarding these oh-so-careful choices we’ve made. They’ll down/upload a track or two and play it after their favorite Mahler Symphony, before the new track from Rufus Wainwright, or interspersed with a bootleg of a Kanye West concert. I think that’s awesome. In an iPod world you can’t predict how people will listen to your album. You just put it out there and wait to see what happens.